In a Name
by twinley
Summary: An insight into the relationship of Penelope and Percy. Penelope acknowledges that her head tells her to leave, but her heart tells her to stay. Will she be a good Penelope and wait, or create a new definition for herself? Read and find out.


**A/N: So I feel super terrible that I did not get a story out in March; my computer has decided to turn again me and not work properly. Now I am sure a lot of you have noticed that this is not one of my normal Ron/Hermione stories. I feel as a writer that sometimes you have to try and challenge yourself and step outside of your comfort zone. So I don't know if anything like this has been written, so I hope I don't offend anybody.**

**So this story revolves around the character Penelope Clearwater, and I talk some about the epic the Odyssey. So if you would like, you can do a quick google summary of that, but I tell you what you need to know in the story, so don't worry about that. I was doing a bit of research regarding this character and I found some confusion of whether she is muggleborn (from the second book when she gets petrified) or half-blood (from Deathly Hallows when Hermione uses her name and says she is half-blood). So for the purposes of this story, and well because I can, she shall be muggleborn.**

**Disclaimer: Everything regarding Harry Potter and that world belongs to the wonderful J.K. Rowling and the epic the Odyssey belongs to Homer. **

**Oh, before I forget, this happens in the summer before the seventh book. So please enjoy!**

When I was younger I had asked my mother where I had gotten my name. She had told me that it had come from a rather romantic story that seemed to apply to her life.

You see, both of my parents are muggles. My father came from a very well-off family, and my mother originated from a rather lower middle class family. So naturally, their families wanted to keep them apart at all costs. My father's mother sent him off to an ivy-league school that her mother had no hope of affording.

My mother spent her days at a more affordable university, but never once straying from my father. At their graduation time my father announced that he would be attending medical school, and asked her if she would wait for him. Of course, my mother said yes.

The night of my father's graduation from medical school, he proposed to my mother whom he thanked for waiting for him for so long, and she thanked him for not straying from her. Of course my father's mother did not approve of her son's marriage, but she could not do anything to stop him.

You are probably wondering what this story has to do with how I got my name. The name that I should have gotten, it seemed, was Juliet. What with the whole families hating each other and trying to pull them apart. I was confused as well when my mother first told me this story. So she took me to the library where she insisted that I should do a little research of my own.

I read many books with the name Penelope in them, but none of them seemed to match what I was looking for. But one day, as if by magic, a book appeared at the table that I was reading at, a book about mythology. Thoroughly interested I spent hours reading the book until I finally stumbled upon a story containing my name. It was the epic the Odyssey.

Now, I won't bore you with the details, but the character Penelope remains faithful to her husband for the twenty years that he is gone and is traveling. She waited for Odysseus just like my mother waited for my father.

As I grew older I came to appreciate my name and the history behind it. I was proud that the woman I was named after was so strong and so smart according to the myth. But now, I wish I was named after someone else.

I first got to properly meet Percy Weasley in my fifth year at Hogwarts. We had both been chosen as prefects for our respected houses, and took the duty to heart. If there ever was to be a competition for the hardest working prefect at Hogwarts, it would have been that year. Percy and I seemed determined to outshine each other and be the best prefect that Hogwarts has ever seen.

We had never discussed this little contest, it was just known. From day one at Hogwarts he was my equal in all my classes, and a Gryffindor no less. He was the one student, besides Hermione Granger of course, that would stay up as late as he could studying in the library at the next table over. In classes we would casually sit near each other so that we could peak at the other's grades when our papers had gotten passed back: it had become an obsession.

But then I started to notice other things about Percy once we were both prefects. As we would talk about the most relevant author of the day and the potions that we found most difficult to brew, I would find myself getting lost in his emerald eyes and my hand would linger closer and closer to his as we walked on our rounds.

I came to admire his "go-to" attitude and his enthusiasm for his studies. I stopped seeing him as competition, but as an equal. I was beginning to fall under the infamous Weasley charm, and there was nothing that I could do to stop it.

By the end of the year I discovered that my crush on him was indeed returned. We wrote parchment upon parchment of letters to each over the summer, and I found myself gleefully awaiting my sixth year at Hogwarts where I could be with him again.

But he insisted that our relationship remain a secret. His argument seemed logical at the time: we needed to focus on our studies and on our duties of being prefects. If other students saw that we were too enamored with each other, then we would not be respected and our peers would begin to break rules when we were around.

Our relationship, however, suddenly came to an abrupt halt when I had become petrified by the monster terrorizing the castle. When I had finally awoken, he was there right by my side holding my hand, with silent tears dripping off the tip of his long nose. Instead of a fleeting crush, I was falling in love with the man sitting dutifully by my side.

Not long after, his sister had revealed that we were indeed a couple, and our relationship blossomed. I was proud to be the girlfriend of Percy, and even more ecstatic about the fact that I could finally tell my friends and family about my boyfriend.

However, my friends did not share in my enthusiasm, and they warned me that dating him was only going to hurt me in the end. They told me of his ambitions in work would be more important to him than I was. Instead of listening to them, I stuck up my nose and stomped off, refusing to believe their arguments. They did not get to see the loving and humorous Percy that was hidden by his uptight and pompous façade.

But if only I had listened.

My seventh year was fantastic with Percy by my side as Head Boy. All the effort that I had put forth in my previous two years was recognized by Professor Dumbledore when I was name Head Girl. Percy and I became the power couple that year, or at least in my eyes we were.

We talked for hours on our rounds, but we never seemed to talk about our plans for after Hogwarts, or at least, not about our plans together. We would talk about all the change that we would make in the Wizarding world now that we were going to be working at the Ministry. We would talk of how Percy would rise up in the ministry and would eventually become Minister. We would talk of how I would make a difference through the Department of Magical Law Enforcement as a lawyer. But we never seemed to talk about our future _together_. It was either Percy's future, or my future.

Maybe that was our problem.

But I just ignored the signs and attached myself to Percy's side throughout our final year at Hogwarts. When he received his letter proclaiming that he obtained a job at the ministry for the upcoming year, I celebrated like his success was my own. However, when I revealed to him that I would be starting off as an unpaid intern, he merely scoffed in my face and listed off the benefits that his job offered. He bragged of the opportunities and various important people that he would meet through the Department of International Cooperation.

I merely brushed this aside, writing it off as him being ecstatic about his upcoming year and not wishing to embarrass me further on my job that was obviously subordinate to his. However, no one told me that everyone has to start out as an intern in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and that it was a _huge_ honor to be selected for one fresh out of school. Maybe if I had known that, Percy would have shown me the respect that I deserve.

Near the close of the year, I began to notice odd tendencies that I had not seen surface in years: he was trying his best to outdo me in our N.E.W.T. studies. Every time that I would earn a better grade on a paper, he would go off and sulk, refusing to talk to me for the remainder of the day. But when he managed to outdo _me_, he would always say, "That's alright, Penny dear, some people just don't understand these things."

My friends would complain that I should not be with a guy that treated me this way and talked to me like that. But I was in love, and nothing they could say could convince that Percy was not the right man for me. I fell in love with the way he threw himself into his schooling, a trait that it seemed only my fellow Ravenclaws possessed. I was delighted to have a brave Gryffindor by my side that would hold my hand and defend me against the taunts of the Slytherins. I was foolish enough to think that he was my knight in shining armor ever since that night in the Hospital Wing.

But the man that was sitting by my side then had all but disappeared when we began our individual careers. He would always consider the work that I brought home as meaningless and not practical. He claimed that the reports he was writing on caldrons would have more impact on society than my report on the effectiveness of the Protego charm.

His letters became less charming and more formal. He would only talk about himself and how his day was going, and what _his_ department had accomplished. He would brag about his connections within the ministry and how the Minister consults him on a daily basis.

He had always bragged about the fact that he was privy to knowledge that only a handful of people were around the Ministry. Once this knowledge became available to the public, I am talking of the Triwizard Tournament of course, I figured his head would deflate and we would go back to the way we were; something I seriously missed.

However, once his "delightful Mr. Crouch" failed to appear at the Triwizard Tournament back at Hogwarts, his head swelled to a size that I had never seen before. But just as my name implied, I decided to wait it out hoping that once the tournament finished and his stint as a judge was through I would get my old Percy back.

But since then, this old Percy has failed to make an appearance. Now, new Percy has taken over his body and I have seen him act in ways that I never thought was possible. He has broken ties with his family claiming that "my loyalties lie with the Ministry, Penny, and if my family cannot foresee the consequences being connected with Dumbledore entails, then I shall no longer be connected with them."

Maybe instead of focusing so much on what my name meant, I should have looked closer into the meaning of his; coincidentally, in ancient Greek, Perseus means "destroyer." This would explain why Percy did not even give a second thought to abandoning his family, and, in hindsight, why he had no difficulty in destroying our relationship.

I have had many opportunities, you see, to break it off with him. Him deserting his family being one of the prime reasons. But as he was off gallivanting in the Ministry at the beck and call of any official, he began to ignore mine. He kept putting off getting a flat together claiming that it would "distract" him from his job, and if he would like to continue climbing the political ladder at the pace that he was, it would be "counterproductive." He implored me to wait from him for a couple more years until his position as the Ministry would be more set and stone.

And just like a good Penelope, I agreed and waited for two years until we finally moved in.

I would be lying if I said I haven't been tempted to stray from him. As he was putting in late hours at the Ministry, I would be sitting at home bored and alone staring at the work that needed to be done. I would wait up for him hoping against all hope that that day would be the day that he would come home early to see me; but he would never come. Soon, I gave up on the fantasy and started listening to the advice that my friends were giving me: to go out and have fun instead of waiting around for Percy to come home.

As I went out drinking at the bars with my friends and co-workers, I would constantly turn away men that were hitting me, claiming I had a boyfriend waiting back home. They would only scoff at me and say that he was a fool for not accompanying me; I agreed.

But waiting did have its benefits. Waiting around for him for five years earned me a diamond necklace, for example. And every year on our anniversary we would go out to a fancy restaurant where we would order the most expensive thing on the menu despite our money situation at the time. We would go home and talk for hours about everything and nothing, just like our early days in our relationship.

During Christmas time we would attend all sorts of Ministry balls and galas, where Percy would proudly parade me around on his arm introducing me to everyone as his "beautiful girlfriend, Penelope." And during those days I felt like a princess, something I wouldn't give up for the world.

And last year for my birthday he surprised me at work claiming that he got off time just for me and we could do whatever to our heart's desires, and we did.

But the problem with these "benefits" I only get them a few times a year. A girl should feel like a princess everyday when she is with her boyfriend. He should spontaneously buy you gifts, and surprise you with weekend getaways. But my Percy isn't like that, at least not anymore. All he seems to care about is himself, his career, and his future. And I don't know if I want to be a part of that anymore.

I kept telling myself that if my mother could wait for my father as he finished up his schooling, then I could wait for Percy to climb the Ministry ladder. And if Penelope in the Odyssey could wait for her husband for twenty years, than I could certainly wait for Percy to return to his old self in a matter of years. That's what my name means right?

But I kept waiting and waiting and _waiting!_ I waited for him to get a better job, to move in, for him to say "I love you." I wait tirelessly for him to ask me to marry him, I wait until he comes home, and I wait until _he_ is ready. I go to _his_ parties, instead of mine. I have to get _his _permission before I do _anything! _And I am waiting for him as we speak with the food slowly growing colder by the minute.

But that is not who _I_ want to be. Not anymore.

Because in the end, it's just a name, and this Penelope is sick of waiting.

**A/N: Alright there we have it! A little insight into the relationship that we did not get to see much about throughout the series due to Percy's pompous attitude. It's kind of sad that once she breaks up with him he gets act together, or at least with his family he does. So, if you would be so kind, please REVIEW REVIEW, I would like to know what you think! Also, if you would like to read some of my other stories, I am told they are not too bad.**

**Hearts,**

**Twinley**

**P.S. Please excuse any and all grammatical errors, I am only human. I only have myself and my sister to proofread, so if anything slipped by, I am sorry.**


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